e Holy Catholic Church.]

[Footnote 168: Both repeatedly and very decidedly declared that the
unity of faith (the rule of faith) is sufficient for the unity of the
Church, and that in other things there must be freedom (see above all
Tertull., de orat., de bapt., and the Montanist writings). It is all the
more worthy of note that, in the case of a question in which indeed the
customs of the different countries were exceedingly productive of
confusion, but which was certainly not a matter of faith, it was again a
bishop of Rome, and that as far back as the 2nd century, who first made
the observance of the Roman practice a condition of the unity of the
Church and treated nonconformists as heterodox (Victor; see Euseb., H.
E. V. 24). On the other hand Irenaeus says: [Greek: he diaphonia tes
nesteias ten homonoian tes pisteos sunistesi].]

[Footnote 169: On Calixtus see Hippolyt., Philos. IX. I2; and Tertull.,
de pudic.]

[Footnote 170: See on the other hand Tertull., de monog., but also
Hippol., l.c.]

[Footnote 171: Cyprian's idea of the Church, an imitation of the
conception of a political empire, viz., one great aristocratically
governed state with an ideal head, is the result of the conflicts
through which he passed. It is therefore first found in a complete form
in the treatise "de unitate ecclesiae" and, above all, in his later
epistles (Epp. 43 sq. ed. Hartel). The passages in which Cyprian defines
the Church as "constituta in episcopo et in clero et in omnibus
credentibus" date from an earlier period, when he himself essentially
retained the old idea of the subject. Moreover, he never regarded those
elements as similar and of equal value. The limitation of the Church to
the community ruled by bishops was the result of the Novatian crisis.
The unavoidable necessity of excluding orthodox Christians from the
ecclesiastical communion, or, in other words, the fact that such
orthodox Christians had separated themselves from the majority guided by
the bishops, led to the setting up of a new theory of the Church, which
therefore resulted from stress of circumstances just as much as the
antignostic conception of the matter held by Irenaeus. Cyprian's notion
of the relation between the whole body of the Church and the episcopate
may, however, be also understood as a generalisation of the old theory
about the connection between the individual community and the bishop.
This already contained an oecumenical element, for, in